How the monitoring for individuals can revolutionize the internet searching?

In the last years, indisputably, interest in Internet monitoring has faced steady growth.

The present-day shape of Internet where information is getting spread in less than no time, determined necessity to monitor and measure the opinions across the Web about certain topics and helped to develop the tools for the purpose.

In this case, it’s important to think over how it affects our daily life and way how potentially it can make easier to search for the informations we want to find. But then, think over, how many times you couldn’t find what you needed using search engine. What is the reason in your opinion?

In a simple words, it’s caused by search engine algorithms, which are limiting the number of results and sequencing how are they shown. Google algorithm, PageRank is favouring the most trustworthy domains and popping them higher in the engine results. This is the reason why we’re limited in access to large part of websites that might be relevant for us. Moreover, one of the most important factor deciding if page will be shown in results is age of the website – it’s easy to guess that freshly-launched websites have a very small chances to appear in a search results. Last but not least, browsing through the webpages in order to find single information is just time consuming.

How to search the Internet then?

PageRank is probably the most advanced search algorithm at the moment, working very well with searching clear informations, e.g. recipe for pizza or formula for standard deviation. The problem comes when trying to search ambiguous things, for instance opinion about product or DIY instructions. And this is the place where internet monitoring plays its role whenever it’s needed to find ambiguous informations. The great advantage of this functionality, included in ZoomSphere, is the ability to quickly get to know the opinion without having to read the whole article and evaluate the sentiment. Great example could be community of stock market investors who make decisions in risky conditions and often uncertainties. There have been many scientific studies that have shown the influence of optimism on risk-taking. By reviewing opinions on the economic situation, the investor is able to anticipate changes in the individual asset classes.

Why Internet monitoring awaits bright future?

There is a saying “When you can not find something on the first page of Google, it does not exist.” It shows the strength of this search engine, but also shows its worst limitation. Despite the impressive number of millions of pages found in a fraction of seconds, most of users stay on the first page of results. There are some studies shows that more than 90% of redirects are reduced to the first ten responses. For this reason, alternative ways of finding relevant informations about brands became popular.

In our monitoring module, the results are presented chronologically and eventually divided by source, so we have an access to information from all web pages and social networks, not just those that are most favored by search engine. This gives us the opportunity to monitor and identify informations on less popular but not necessarily worse sites as it can be in search engines

Imagine a situation when you want to buy a new phone – the obvious thing is that you want to know something more about its specifications. You can easily do this through the search engine and come up with conclusion that it meets your expectations, but there is no need to judge the book by the cover (or phone after specification 😉), so you want to see the reviews. Typing the popular search term “phone X reviews” and getting the results will immediately show you many opinion pages, but to get to the first one, you will probably spend few more minutes. After reading more and more reviews, you become increasingly disoriented, because some of them only praise and others show only flaws the product you’re searching. Few hours passed like a glimpse and you’ve only read a little piece of reviews available on the Internet.

Using the monitoring completely change the situation. Within minutes you are able to find out how many people have left their opinions on this phone. By analyzing sentiment you can learn how many people talk about the issue and what do they actually say, whether good or bad. At any time you can read the complete reviews that will exceptionally drive your attention, not forgetting to mention about additional features such as, for example, the analysis of product epitopes

Conclusions?

It’s still a long way before the monitoring will expand to the market of individual customers. The key matter will be to develop further the ability to draw conclusions without having to read the entire contents of the pages. According to various studies, the number of information generated by humanity increases exponentially, so the amount of data increases twice every two years. That creates potentially a huge niche that can be filled by internet monitoring. We can not foresee for 100% if the Internet will adopt this way of searching, but current trends certainly promises to be exciting!